Jack Linchuan Qiu
School of Journalism and Communication
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
When Dayan and Katz proposed the concept of “media events” in 1992, they were talking about large-scale public events constructed on the backbone of TV broadcasting systems worldwide, which were at the time increasingly interconnected with each other due to the technological advancement of satellite TV and the fall of communism. Their model was very much about consensus building and the leadership of elite media professionals in shaping global public opinion. This was closely connected to the original CNN model before the emergence of Zee TV,
which targeted lower-income audiences in the Indian subcontinent, and before the rise of Al Jazeera and other successful middle-eastern news channels, which represents a major challenge to the traditional order of international journalism established since the late nineteenth century. Sixteen years have passed since 1992. At the dawn of the new century, with the spread of low-end digital media in much of the Global South, and the materialization of China as a center of journalistic geopolitics worldwide, one would wonder:
Is China, or more precisely, the most pioneering group of Chinese journalists today, going along similar directions as Zee TV and Al Jazeera?
Is elite-led, consensus-building “media event” becoming obsolete?
Is there sufficient evidence for the coming of what one may call “new media events”?
Conceptually, new media event is not just public event transmitted through new media forms such as the Internet or mobile phone. It is more fundamentally about (a) the involvement of non-elite, citizen journalists in the news-making and news dissemination process, (b) the effort to go beyond collective consensus-building to capture more pluralism in the fledging public sphere of transitional societies, and (c) the hybridization of developmental journalism with the struggle for press freedom within the digitized and enlarged media ecology of the twenty-first century.
But to what extent is this conceptual proposal capable of reflecting the reality of Chinese journalism, particularly citizen journalism, today? Most scholars examining citizen journalism in China hold an optimistic view, from a liberal perspective, and argue that Internet- and mobile-phone-based grassroots journalists in China represent a definitive new wave for media reform in the country; and that this is a uniquely Chinese development. This paper, however, takes a more critical perspective in order to sort out both the liberating potentials of new media events and the latent problems of citizen journalism. In so doing, as this paper shall argue, it is essential that we look beyond China, and thinking beyond the here and now. There is much to be learned from the earlier experiences of Zee TV and Al Jazeera in order for us to have a more coherent view on the reality of current media reform in the Global South.
This is, of course, not to deny the extension of conventional “media events” into today’s mediascape. From Beijing Olympics to China’s space walk, we see a clear pattern of elite domination and consensus-building. However, the glamour of such “media events” cannot fully reflect the alternative nature of other, very different, and much more interesting, developments. These include such “new media events” as the South China tiger controversy, the death of Sun Zhigang (a migrant worker killed under police custody), the Xiamen PX environmental movement, the Chongqing nail house incident, and the Edison Chan “photo-gate” scandal, all of which will be introduced and pieced together against the context of journalism reform in China and the Global South since the end of the Cold War.
The citizen journalists involved in these new media events include not only professional media workers but also amateur reporters from the very bottom of society. Many of them are migrant workers, laid-off workers, and underemployed youth. They do not know journalism theory. But they practice developmental journalism using digital media to ensure the survival of their communities, families, and themselves. It is these bottom-of-the-pyramid citizen reporters who hold the most promise for China to rise as an alternative power in international journalism and to break with both western-centric models of newsmaking as well as China’s own past of authoritarian press control.
But just like the Zee TV journalists being absorbed into the infotainment business, Chinese citizen reporters are also facing tremendous challenge of interpenetration by the political power and co-optation by economic interests. This trend has already been palpable with the increasing blurring between the public and the private and between professional reporting and collective catharsis, as is perhaps best exemplified by “human flesh search engines” among Chinese netizens today.
New media events, thus construed, start as a concentrated effort for the poor and disenfranchised to find their voice in media system and define history using their own experiences. But as new media events evolve, they may also consolidate traditional power and fall back to the old pattern of being silenced and re-integrated into the old “media events”.
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